Panhe 2022

Panhe celebration will be held March 27, 2022.

A Native American gathering and celebration of protection and preservation. 

San Mateo Campground, San Onofre State Beach, San Clemente. 

Admission is free.

 

ElectricNick: No Direction Home by Nick Butt (Kindle book review)

The Kindle-only ElectrickNick: No Direction Home by Nick Butt is the fascinating story of a young man who appeared fated to sink rapidly into homelessness and addiction after leaving his dysfunctional family, but escaped and ran through London’s Swinging Sixties and early seventies like a hippy Zelig. Everyone you could possibly think to appear in the book does so. Nevertheless, Nick manages not to come across as a name-dropper; he (and his co-writer Richard Marris) simply recount, in an unadorned and workmanlike fashion, the things that happened around him, and it turns out to be everything worth happening.

The closest memoir I can think of is Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles, but Nick’s story lacks the air of glamour and the inevitability of success that peppers Boyd’s gallivant through the upper echelons of the Hippie Establishment.

Indeed, Nick writes, without mentioning any names, “In hindsight, many of the leading figures of those times were at best self-serving and at worst exploitative and sexually predatory. Their voices and endlessly self-promoting stories dominate the history of our British version of the counterculture, while people with fresh angles and insights take them to the grave.” This comes just after a mention of his (then) recent meeting with one of the London scene ladies, where she says she now “views a lot of what she experienced in her early teens as paedophilia, somehow justified as a form of self-expression.”

But the book is in no way explicit, nor salacious, nor judgmental. It merely describes Nick’s journey, which takes him from Middle Earth (the London Club of that name), Notting Hill, through Pacific Island paradises, via clapped out hippy bus-rides through the Middle East and non-airworthy planes to Bali, to Australian communes and back. What lifted him out of the quicksand of poverty that overtook so many at the time – the traps laid for troubadours who got killed before they reached Bombay – is his uncanny affinity with the mechanical and electrical. Every time the money ran out, he met someone who needed an engine repair, a recording studio built or a demon-possessed transistor radio exorcising. And in the counter-culture territories of New South Wales, everyone needed solar panels.

Thrill to what happened to the enameled pot that came in handy initially because he had dysentery and needed to bail stuff out of the window! Find out how to explain to the highway patrol why the handbrake of your faltering vehicle is lying on the seat! Have fun with adventures like the following, which almost unbelievably happened in London, not the New Hebrides:

“One Sunday afternoon a few months later we were putting on a benefit for a group called The Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom when we were raided aggressively by the Bow Street constabulary. As they left they told the market traders that we were burning a child at the stake, which goaded them into smashing up the whole club with axes and grappling hooks.”

Delight in anecdotes such as this, which is also incredibly set in England:

“Septimus had bought it [a contraption apparently composed of batteries and CRTs] for £5 from a local farmer who maintained it was a UFO he had seen crash land in one of his fields. We later learned that a local eccentric, who claimed to be Mick Jagger's uncle, had produced it as a prototype for a spaceship. Maybe he built the real thing because he disappeared one day, leaving all his belongings behind and was never heard of again. I bought the vessel for £7 as a conversation piece but before I could collect it a chap named Scorpio smashed it up with an axe 'because it was evil'.”

Or this:

“We had dropped acid on the ferry and all seemed normal until we were confronted by the 50 or so clocks in Gabe's parents' living room and by the time we sat down for tea my sausages were breathing. My efforts to force them down weren't helped by Gabe's mum, who'd had part of her gullet removed, pulling a tube and funnel out of her cardigan and pouring pieces of bacon and egg into it.”

And did you know:

“The French were testing nuclear bombs at Mururoa Atoll, 3,559 miles of nothing but sea away and the electro-magnetic pulses from the detonations fried transistors all around the South Pacific.”

I’m not using up all the best tales here, because there are literally hundreds of them. Every page has something incredible happen, or someone incredible met. Much is funny. The first half has the 60's rock royalty. The latter half, where he and his lady build a home and garden from scratch in the Australian eucalyptus forests, is equally gripping. The middle, island-hopping tales in the Pacific, are like Heart of Darkness meets Trobriand Cricket.

Nick and his co-writer seems to have been working from diaries, because they seem sure of dates, names and number of appearances. Which is interesting, because Mick Farren told me the Deviants had never played with Led Zeppelin (only with the Band of Joy) but Nick says they did, and describes the event. I guess that’s the advantage of keeping good records.

An excellent companion book to more famous memoirs by people who may have had an interest in whitewashing their sixties exploits.



Edit: Nick provided the proof!

Advice for aspiring writers

One frequent piece of advice given to neophyte writers is "Keep a piece of paper and a pencil with you at all times - you never know when an idea will strike and believe me, you won't remember it, however much you think you will. Write it down immediately."

A few days ago I was in the car and had a brilliant idea for a funny pun - probably something like "Ha ha! Nerd's Best Soup!" or "Why don't I rewrite Mick Farren's 1975 classic novel The Texts of Festival as actual texts from an actual festival?" Anyway, I couldn't find a pencil and paper and STB rather pointedly (since he'd bought it for me) remarked, "Why do you need paper? You have a miniature supercomputer in your handbag!" And so I do, a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. But I have no idea how to take a note on it. I suppose I could Tweet the idea.

I do have pieces of paper and pencils in the bathroom and in my bedside drawer, though.  Every now and again some writing appears on the pad in the bedroom and the simplest explanation is that I have written it because I have had A Nidea during the night.  One appeared today and I have no memory whatsoever of writing it, and I don't know if it's from a dream or just a great idea I had while falling asleep that needed writing down so it would not be lost to the world.

It says:

"Jerry, I'm dying!"
"Dying? Good! You tried to consume the whole world and the best thing that could happen to you is die!"
Inhuman black beetle eyes made me wonder if a human could climb it.
Leaning out of the first floor window looking at the legs of the women below in their short shorts as they run for the bus ball.

I really don't have a clue what that means, or even whether it's one thought, or two, or three. How wonderful it has been preserved for posterity.

Festival of Light, November 13th.

Happy Diwali!



(Picture is from Fun on the Net.)

Halloween in Baltimore

With a trip to Washington DC under my belt, it was time to head for Baltimore, home of Edgar Allan Poe, for a trip around the crypts and a some short story readings.

On the way there, we visited the American Visionary Art Museum. Definitely worth a visit, if you're there. It mainly focuses on work by people who don't really see things the same way as other people. Some of them are religiously inspired, and some are just...different. I forget the PC term.

The temporary exhibit was on the theme, "What Makes Us Smile?" What mostly made *us* laugh were the Whoopee Cushions that went off whenever someone sat on a particular bench. Adults mostly did it by accident, being able to read the name on the cushions but failing to do so and getting embarrassed, and kids mostly did it deliberately because they love fart jokes. Apart from that, most people wandered around doing things like looking at pictures of Alfred E. Neumann or reading jokes by Jon Stewart with a scholarly air of absorption. My friend Kali was laughing at the jokes, and when I pointed out to her that no-one else was, because a MUSEUM IS SERIOUS BUSINESS GODDAMMIT it only made her laugh more.

Then we ate too much (a recurring theme on my trips with Kali Durga) and went to Westminster Hall and Burying Ground for the Annual Halloween Tour. Westminster Hall is a suitably twisted burying place for Poe. The original graveyard was in operation from 1786 (and contains a number of veterans of both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812). When a church was needed, in order to avoid disturbing the remains, the church was designed to be built on stilts. The graves are still there, complete with headstones, underneath it. Not only that, but there are above-ground crypts both underneath it and around it. (The church was completed in 1852.)

Poe is not underneath the church - he died too late for that, in 1849. His original grave was unmarked, but as interest in his stories grew, his remains were disinterred and moved to a more prominent spot, and given a large marker.

The Halloween tour included the inevitable Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the organ (pictured above - those are the decorative fake pipes, the real pipes occupying much more space behind them), trips around the crypts (none of which were lying broken open with bones strewn around, disappointingly. I'd even have lived without seeing gnaw marks if there had been a bit of strewing), cider and popcorn, and a recitation of The Telltale Heart by a dead ringer for Tom Baker, The Doctor, both in looks and performance. Excellent portrayal of nutcasery by a fine local actor whose name I did not catch.

Deserts

This weekend was San Diego Street Scene, to which I have never been before, even though it's only sixty miles away from my house (I'm equidistant between LA and SD) and has been going on for twenty five years. This time I made it, and this is a somewhat quirky review of it.

We'd booked into a motel, which I'll call the Blue Orchid so as not to give away its true identity. This little gem was two tram stops down from the Street Scene. We got there just an hour before the 4pm start of the Friday program and checked in rather hurriedly. It's a rock-bottom motel, though the price, $72 including tax, seemed a bit steep. We were thoroughly charmed by the sign saying that we were not allowed to have prostitutes, drugs or firearms in our rooms. STB wondered why the Marriott never sees fit to put up signs like that, and you know what? I don't know either. It seems a very sensible set of rules. The proprietor handled transactions through one of those bullet-proof glass windows where you have to slide your ID and credit card under a dip in the counter so there is no chance you can fire through the cash slot or grab someone's hand as they work. The place was clean inside and some things in the room worked quite well. Although I'd brought everything – a heap of electronics ranging from laptop to flat-iron for my hair, it turned out I didn't have a comb. And we were in a part of San Diego that just wasn't going to provide one. Oh wells. We paid for our MTS (tram) tickets in quarters and set off to the Street Scene.

It was kind of deserted. As I got used to it, I realized we were here way early. There was not much going on except the music, so no one would be arriving until the bands got 'good'. The 'scene' itself was three stages on three dead-end streets in the poor enclave of East San Diego, arranged so that the short stub of a street was the auditorium, and there were two larger stages at opposite ends of the parking lot of Petco Park. This meant the entire thing was on concrete or asphalt, in the middle of August in San Diego where the temperature is mid-nineties and the humidity is far higher than LA, making it a sweat bath with nowhere to sit or lie down at all. And I mean at all. A festival normally has like, a tree or something, or a patch of grass. This had just San Diego curbs to sit on. There were unlimited pass-outs when you wore the wristband, of course, but you passed out to East San Diego, i.e. several thousand acres of more curbs, concrete, parking lots and asphalt. There was a tram station but my sleeping on benches in bus stations days are thankfully over. Anyway, I said no whining in this post, so I'll stop, after mentioning how much my feet were still blistered after spending Wednesday lining up, seeing The Dead Weather and walking on concrete in LA.



First band we saw were the Wavves, whom I liked tremendously. Guitar, voice and drums, punk sound. They had Animal on drums. I know that's a cliché, but the description really fitted the guy, and on guitar (a powder-blue Strat (copy?)) was a young guy with seventeen thousand metric tonnes of reverb on his microphone. At one point between songs he said, "Is that too much reverb? No, we're good." And off they went again. Except he actually sounded to have said "Is that is that too is that much that reverb too much that reverb too much reverb much reverb reverb?" They were great. Wonderful attitude and some good songs, just happy to be playing for people who are happy listening to them.

Next, Holy Fuck. I'd assumed they were a punk band too, from the name, but I guess it is a trance sort of name instead, judging by their sound. At one point somebody appeared to blowing down a tube into a pixiephone and we decided to classify them as 8 bit or at least Lo-Fi. They were nice, danceable and listenable but not too memorable.

I did want to watch Mastodon, but STB vetoed them on sight, after catching a glimpse of a Hairy on the stage's overhead screen and hearing the heavy (man) music pounding out on the street. On that brief and possibly unfair exposure, they seemed like the sort of band that would have gone down very well in Birmingham (UK) in 1976 along with Sabbath, Purple etc. I'm told they are part of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, and having heard the original heavy metal and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, I imagine I'm not too incorrect here.

We saw and heard a bit of Cake in the distance and it seemed mostly to be Mr. Cake saying something bad tempered about the band, the equipment or the lights. Then suddenly out of nowhere they played Black Sabbath's War Pigs so we sang along and head-banged. It's always good to have a daily fix of Sabbaff.

Then another Canadian band, Chromeo. They played rather wilted modern R&B with a lot of synth, voice changing synthesizers and common or garden beats. The only thing I can remember of them is their "station ID" song about their name being Chromeo which is stuck in my head and won't dislodge. Great light show. They had sort of tall poles of light behind them that did tricks and I could have watched them all night. It was like a trained circus pony act except made of photons. Great stuff. Can I have one for my birthday?

We made the mistake of going to see the very, very popular Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band on one of the big stages. It sounded like watered-down Irish music, bland and virtually affectless. The audience loved it and lapped it all up. What does that tell you? I don't really know but I guess it explains why whenever I ask someone to recommend me really good music I'm usually disappointed. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Same deal with Modest Mouse. I thought they sucked the life out of everything they touched. But thousands of people went to see them and cheered every song to the heights. They reminded me of those modern light bulbs, you know the ones that say "37 watt bulb! Saves 10% power over the old 40 watt bulb!" Yes, they do, but they're 10% duller. This was a definite 37 watt day for these guys. I know this is a cruel thing to say, but I classified them as "Music that is trying to win a Grammy". That's not very indie, is it?





We should have then gone on to watch the Black Eyed Peas but we decided that it would not be necessary.

Best festival food: Curry, from the Bombay Curry stall. Usually festival curry is a combination of lethally undercooked garbanzo beans, some strange acid (lactic?) picked up during an unconventional cooking process, salmonella and brown rice that resembles sharp gravel purchased for parrot's gizzards. In this case, it was a nice, warming, perfectly-cooked vegetable curry. We browsed stalls selling scarves, t shirts, bangles, nose rings, Nokia phones, and some sort of sharp-taloned curved finger stalls with skulls and monsters on them. I would like to be the sort of person who wears things like those but I'm not, and short of a Singularity I'm unlikely to become one. There was not a great deal of merchandise, it has to be said.

Back to the motel, shedding all prostitutes, firearms and drugs on the way so as not to break the posted rules. In the morning, since I had forgotten a comb I sent the ever-lucky STB out to buy one. He came back with a brush and a beard trimmer set that included a comb. (I don't have a beard.) The tail-light on my car had been smashed.

We drove back to East Village or whatever it's called, instead of taking the tram, and parked in an industrial road close to the tram station. There was a 'no defecation/no urination' sign against the fence, but from the smell of it, most people in the district ignored it. We walked past probably the most run-down area I've been in inside the last thirty years (I used to live in un-rejuvenated East London, and I'm counting that) before arriving at the tram station. At one point, next to a traffic light box, a weed had thrust up through a bad repair in lumpy asphalt and produced a strong and evil looking shrub almost four feet high. It was the only green thing surviving, a nasty, stinking weed like something Sam might have found growing in a crack in Mordor's filth. Having walked through LA's garment district three days before, the contrast was incredible. The LA area was poor, but everyone was doing something, working, thronging, buying, bustling, shuttling kids, maybe working for piece rates but at least working. This was a dead area. (It was Saturday, which didn't help, but I think there's still a significant difference.) At the tram station, the world suddenly went from post-industrial (closed muffler shops, abandoned pipe-fitter shops) to post-modern, with the square concrete clock tower and its little red decorations, the hotels, Petco Park, a lot of new apartment buildings, and the well-trodden areas of the city.

We had pizza for breakfast at BASIC pizza, which was far better than basic, chatted to the homburg-wearing pizza guy about Street Scene (Dead Weather fan, unable to go tonight) and then left to leach off the Marriott's internet connection until the day's festivities started. We had a list of wifi hotspots in the area and I felt a little like a nomad with a nomad's arcane knowledge – not knowing the oases where I can graze my goats, or the mountain caves where god manifests but a very clear idea of the power points where I can recharge my computer and the overlay of wifi where I can rejoin the net.

We saw the Crocodiles – can't remember much about them but they went into the "would see again" category. Then Blue Scholars, who were a lot of fun. An old-school hip hop group, they had some classic beats and hook-filled dance tunes. The DJ was fast and clever with a great sense of humor. At one point one of the GIANT bugs that live in the industrial area beyond the end of the dead-end streets flew over and buzzed him and he was running around shouting about the biggest bug he ever saw. That wasn't part of the act, I'm just saying. I wonder what the hell they were? They looked like beetles rather than palmetto bugs, and seemed to seek out sound waves to fly around in. Maybe pressure waves in the air confuse them or something.

Then we went to see Public Enemy, who need no introduction, I'm sure. Although by this stage they are a greatest-hits group, touring their albums on their twenty year anniversaries, they were tight, loud, fast and still politically motivated. The beats started with that deep bass thrum that I used to be able to hear, but now can't, played so loud that they made the cartilage in my nose and throat vibrate. Weird when you can no longer hear it. It continued to be loud enough to be felt for an hour and a half. The bad news is that they were only booked for 45 minutes, but nothing, and I mean nothing, shuts up Flava Flav when he's in full effect. Chuck D and Flava Flav traded off, as usual. The S1W's did their silent, menacing dances (with katanas, this time. I guess Uzis were banned at some point in the last twenty years) and we all danced, a lot. Flava crowd surfed, climbed the scaffolding, threw goodies out to the crowd and generally kept up a steady 120% of capacity energy level. He insisted Chuck D's wife come onstage so we could cheer their wedding anniversary. At one point he told us he did the things he did because he liked pussy, and then caught himself and apologized to all the mothers with children out there.

And Public Enemy were the only band we saw who bothered to deliver an anti-war message. PE alone who gave the speech about supporting troops meaning not sending them meaningless places to die over pointless causes. Brave, in a military town like San Diego and very much appreciated by me.

That threw everyone's schedules out. I really wanted to see the Silversun Pickups, but instead went right to the large stage to watch the end of Of Montreal so I could get a good place for The Dead Weather. Since I hadn't planned to go, I hadn't looked them up and I have no idea why Of Montreal do the shtick they do, but the overall effect is of people dressed as cardinals and furry animals singing glam rock songs much like the ones from Velvet Goldmine. They had a big crowd, all there for them, very happy with the band. I'd definitely put them in the "would see again" category.




As they left, we moved forward for The Dead Weather, and I staked out a place near the barrier. In front of me was a young girl, no more than five feet tall and in front of her, a friend of hers the same height. That's always good. I'm five four. I wear heels but almost everyone is taller than me. Getting to the barrier is the only way to see a show. With two women that size in front of me, I had the duty of ensuring no one pushed me, which would crush them – I'd have a soft landing, but they would have the metal barrier in their ribs. I braced myself against the barrier with one hand, next to a woman who I'm guessing didn't appreciate it by the way she tried to crush my hand. The rather messy roadies for Of Montreal used a leaf-blower to clear away confetti and glitter – some of which stuck to us – while the disciplined, hat-wearing Jack White roadies set up their gear with simple efficiency. Since we had nothing to do but watch, someone in the crowd took to answering one guy's mike testing by hollering his words back to him as if it were a call-and-response song. Eventually he gave us the finger. Hee. You make your own fun, don't you? We have a larf, don't we?

The crowd was boisterous, determined to push from the sides to the middle. I kept my hand on the barrier. Despite the crushing. (I'll never play guitar again.)

The Dead Weather had to change their set slightly for Street Scene – no encores, so Treat Me Like Your Mother was moved up to just before Will There Be Enough Water. They played two new ones – Jawbreaker and one I didn't recognize. I love Jawbreaker, which has such a great riff. They were in a far more open mood tonight, possibly because they were winning over people who had come to see other bands, rather than performing directly for people who have already bought into the mystique – no fighting, no drinking, no theater, just straight ahead bluesy rock and roll. We even got smiles and thank yous a couple of times. The band has really come together in just a few months and yet plays as though they grew up together, tight, focused and full of energy. It was a blistering show and must have won over a lot of new fans.




As soon as they finished, I twigged we wouldn't get an encore and started to leave. About half way out I remembered the little girl in front of me. She had been swaying with heat and dehydration and I'd just left her, without pulling the man who was with her, behind my companion, forward to take care of her. I hope she's okay. I felt terrible about that.

To celebrate yet another wonderful Dead Weather show, we didn't bother going to watch MIA. We went back to the car, where the secret of the aroma of Excrement Alley was revealed – it's where all the homeless people sleep. So the way to our car was lined by hundreds of lumps of clothes, bags and plastic bottles, each of which had a sleeping human at its kernel. Each one sleeping on concrete in an arid wasteland.

These inner city deserts, that's what I'll take away from this week. Dehydration, heat prostration, hard concrete, prison camp lines and long forced waits in borderline dangerous environments. That, and the 96c water-seller guy waiving the extra fee because I didn't have it, the wonderful people in line with me and the great shows.

concrete

Happy This Time of The Year!

Happy Diwali, Halloween and Samhain!

Glastonbury (DVD) 2006

"Glastonbury", Julien Temple's 2006 documentary of the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts.

I've wanted to go to Glastonbury ever since I was too young to afford the amazingly attractive triple album of the second festival from 1971 – featuring Hawkwind, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, the Pink Fairies and a host of others. There have been 25 festivals there since. I never did get to go. This week I rented the movie of what I've missed.

It really wasn't what I expected, and it took me a little time to get in sync with what is really a chain of two hours of images linked by a slight narrative – the words of the organizer of the festivals, Michael Eavis. He comes across as one of those wonderful Britons who has spent countless hours – years – bringing ordinary people what they want, but whom you never expect to get a gong from Her Maj. She proved me wrong. He got a CBE this year. Eavis was inspired by Led Zeppelin's open air appearance at Bath Festival in 1970. He developed a desire to host his own festival, and put on his first one, called the Pilton Festival, at the same site in 1970. You won't find any such facts in this film. It really isn't set up to disseminate facts, but to deliver a champagne-pop of color and sound instead.

The short clips are edited together without identification, so you will see footage of the original Glastonbury Fayre pyramid of 1971 next to a modern scaffolding; Woodstock-era hippies toking up in 1970-era tie-died cotton-based clothing and 21st century men in carbon-fiber costumes, cell-phones on their hips. You'll see Travelers welding their cars into a Carhenge and an acrobat tumbling and dancing in a hoop under a glowing hot-air balloon ten meters above the audience. You'll see can-can dancers; naked crowds surfing in half a meter of English mud; nude men dancing inside floating bubbles and Joe Strummer attacking the camera with a mike stand, apparently believing it to be a proxy for the CCTV Surveillance Society outside the barrier fence of Glastonbury. Fire-twirlers, dinosaurs, an incredible variety of hash delivery systems, over a million tents. Hundreds of ordinary people talking, or in some cases attempting to form words, about their feelings regarding the festival and other festival goers. Pulp, the Scissor Sisters, Velvet Underground; many others.

For the first hour, I was fairly convinced I'd been to Glastonbury in the late seventies/early eighties, but then Eavis started talking about Stonehenge and how that was the festival that attracted the less well-off and the poorly-behaved. Then I remembered; yes, it was Stonehenge I'd been to. There is a section on the fortunes of the Travelers, the unruly caravan of people who roamed Britain for many years, at first settling for the summer at Stonehenge and then later allowed by the remarkably laid-back Eavis to graze at Glastonbury. Most of the generations of people I recognized, but if you don't know your tipi people from your Travelers from Hippies and punks, you may well have no clue which century some of the footage is from.

There's so much material in this movie that I was overwhelmed by the sheer color, noise, speed and variety of things that are fun and yet can still be done in those dense crowds of up to 300,000. With that amount of visual stimulation, it almost seems like the music is afterthought in the film. But in fact there's plenty here, ranging from Melanie, being Melanie, through Bjork, being Bjork, to a latter-day David Bowie, now looking like an asteroid belt-dwelling Dickensian shifty character, singing 'Heroes' to a hundred thousand upturned faces.

It's a bit long for my tastes, and there is a rather British focus on toilets, but it's well worth a Netflix.

Festivals of Light

Happy Diwali!

Driving away the darkness of winter is a common festival at this time of year. Diwali is one. In England, November the 5th is Bonfire Night. Growing up in Yorkshire in the Sixties, we always had a bonfire. It involved us kids finding pieces of wood wherever we could – for me, that usually meant floorboards from abandoned houses, old pianos and planks from disused (or at least unguarded) garden sheds – and piling them up in a roughly conical shape about 12 feet high, usually in a garden, but on abandoned land if a big party was planned. Then our gang would post pickets, because, of course, it may be a bonfire to us, but to everyone else it was a source of pieces of wood for their own bonfire. Where I grew up, stealing wood was called scrumping. Scrumping normally refers to stealing apples from someone else's orchard, another favored autumnal activity.

Having built a bonfire, we would then make a guy by stuffing a pair of trousers and a shirt, adding a pillow head and a scary mask for a face. We would take the guy around on a pram and use it to demand money with menaces from passers-by. The money went to buying fireworks. The guy would end up on the bonfire, burned with the wood.

The local custom was to bake parkin and make bonfire toffee. We'd also roast potatoes in the fire, but I don't know if that was a tradition, or if it was just an excuse to eat roast potatoes.

My parents, who were neither hippies nor Wicca, explained to me that the bonfire tradition was a carryover from Samhain bonfires, traditionally held on October 31st. Despite having had little justification for existing under Christianity, the urge to light fires had not gone away, and people had seized on the plot to blow up parliament as a good excuse. The tradition of burning unwanted things from last year – or evil spirits, or both - in the bonfire continued, but they were given the name 'guy'. Not being either hippies or Wicca, my parents didn't say Samhain. They said "Halloween bonfires". They may have mentioned Celts. I forget. The sixties were a long time ago.

Recently I've been told that I've been participating in a murderous anti-Catholic frenzy, a tradition 402 years old, based on my country's bloodthirsty reaction to Guy Fawkes, a terrorist - or freedom fighter - who tried to do away with the entire bigoted government of England in one big gunpowder-filled bang.

Now, to be fair to this viewpoint, we did call the manikin we burned the "guy". We did know the first two lines of the rhyme "Remember, remember, the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot". But no-one I knew could have reliably told you which denomination of Christianity Guy Fawkes had professed, or indeed could have given two shits about him and his plot, except that most of us wished he'd succeeded (on general blowing-stuff-up principles) or wished he'd come back and try again (during the Thatcher years).

Far from advocating Catholic-hanging, the song most of us sang at bonfires went like this:

Build a bonfire
Build a bonfire
Put the teachers on the top
Put the dinner ladies round the bottom
And burn the stinking lot

However, I feel retroactively guilty. I apologize for the offence I caused by wanting to build fires in Autumn when I was like, nine, and I will take care to admonish my younger self if I see her. I hope the fact that I'd never heard a single anti-Catholic sentiment expressed at a bonfire in twelve years of going to them is some comfort to you.

I have never seen articles vilifying bonfire night like the ones I saw this year. Last year's were milder, and going back more than a handful of years, I don't think I even saw it mentioned at all. I did poll all the English people I came across since I heard about this, though, and the results were mixed.

Anti-Catholic celebration: 50% (N=1)
Never heard of any Catholic connection with bonfire night: 50% (N=1)

There aren't many English people around here to ask . . .

In case you're wondering, I did also break down those results by religion of respondent.

Anti-Catholic celebration: 100% of Catholic respondents (N=1)
Never heard of any Catholic connection with bonfire night: 100% of Protestant respondents (N=1)


Now, why has the Oughties seen such a revival of the idea that bonfire night is about hatin' on Catholics? I think the second comment in the Making Light thread, followed by the amusingly irony-impaired third comment, tells us all we need to know. They concern the "heady days of religious bigotry. . . when every single crime ever committed by a Catholic was . . . cause to condemn the religion as a threat."

I believe there is tremendous pressure to use bonfire night as a Lesson For Us All in the futility and medievalness of religious intolerance, despite the fact that the shoe hardly fits. When you need a lesson in a hurry, anything will do.

Sod that. Bonfire Night is about eating Bonfire Toffee, burning off the old year, and watching the sparks fly into the deepening, darkening Autumn night.